Thursday, November 01, 2007

On curries and placentas

I got to be honest, I HATE any kind of curry. Not my thing. And, finally I have a good reason. A woman was fined today for lacing her husband's curry with dog excrement. Goes without saying that he ate some of it before she burst into laughter and he took her (subsequently) to court and divorced her. Now, as the saying goes, it takes two to tango so she probably had at least some reason to be irritated about her husband. Still, doc excrement... I dunno. Anyway, my main thing really is: be weary of curry, it's even possibly to hide dog excrement in it without you ever noticing.

While I am on the sexist topic of women doing odd things, a story from South Africa. A woman in Durban stole placenta (image to the left for illustrative purposes only) from a hospital storage room in order to sell it off as a lucky charm to interested parties. So, she sliced the stuff into small pieces put them in nice looking glass containers (you might have bought one during your last trip, probably in a local flea market), and sold em off. Well, yuck it is. Ugh! - Quite so. Also goes without saying that she stole the placenta, that it wasn't her's to begin with, and that the former owners didn't consent to their placenta being turned into luck charms. So, it's not that the thief performed too well on the ethics front.

BUT, seriously, who was harmed by any of this? The placenta would have been discarded by the hospital (I have never seen a woman clamoring to take it home). So, the thief, at best engaged in a peculiar kind of recycling I suppose. If someone steals rubbish, even lucky charm rubbish such as placentas, is the appropriate response really a suspended 1 year prison term as the Magistrate in the South African had it? I don't know...

I fully appreciate that this all is more of the weekend entertainment variety, and for that I apologise, but these sorts of acts don't come across one's desk every day....

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